572
PARTISAN REVIEW
creative capacity or to an ambition altogether incommensurate to
their talents-for unerring signs of election to an alienated elite. But
all a free culture can do is to provide opportunities for revolt: it
cannot guarantee professional success.
No one knows the secret of significant creativity. We do know
it cannot be mass produced and that it cannot emerge under condi–
tions of extreme privation. But since the material lot of American
artists has improved considerably in the last few decades and since the
cultural atmosphere in America is much more receptive to the notion
of total dedication to a creative calling- the son's announcement that
he refuses to enter business or a profession but wants to be a writer,
artist or musician no longer causes a family crisis-I must confess I
do not know why the American arts are more anemic than the arts
abroad
if
they are. And I suspect that no one else knows. Certainly,
American work in science, scholarship and medicine does not lag
behind European achievements. The hypothesis that mass culture
and the popular arts- the Hollywood trap!-threaten the emergence
of a significant culture of vitality and integrity because they consti–
tute a perpetual invitation to a sell-out seems very far-fetched. Unless
one is an incurable snob (I am old enough to remember intense
discussions by otherwise intelligent people as to whether the cinema
is an art), the forms of mass culture and the popular arts should
serve as a challenge to do something with them. There are "sell-outs"
of course but there are two parties to every "sell-out." The writer who
"sells out" to Hollywood or the slicks cannot absolve himself of re–
sponsibility on the ground that he wouldn't be able to live as plushily
as if he did. Why should he? I shall be accused of saying that I am
sentencing artists and writers to starvation. But if scholars can live
Renan's life of "genteel poverty" and do important work so can those
who don't go to Hollywood.
Finally, I see no specific virtue in the attitude of conformity or
non-conformity. The important thing is that it should be voluntary,
rooted in considered judgment, an authentic expression of some value
or insight for which the individual is prepared to risk something.
'Conformity' or 'non-conformity' are relational terms. Before evalu–
ating them I should like to know
to and with what
a person
is
con–
forming or not conforming and
how.
Under the Weimar Republic,
Stefan George, Spengler and Hitler were non-conformists: under the
Czarist regime Dostoevsky in his most fruitful years was a conformist.
